A state campaign alerting Ohioans to the problem of opiate drug abuse will be splashed on convenience store signs, billboards and social media sites statewide.

Tom Niehaus rarely shows aggravation. But the Senate president didn’t even try to hide his displeasure yesterday. The target of his agitation was a fellow Republican: Secretary of State Jon Husted, who a day earlier had called for the repeal of an elections-law overhaul approved last year by the House and Senate.

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel hasn’t attended a single monthly meeting of the powerful but mundane state board that decides which banks will hold billions in state deposits, records show.

Executions in Ohio may be on hold again as state prison officials refine their lethal-injection protocol to meet a federal judge’s requirements. Without objection from Attorney General Mike DeWine yesterday, U.S. District Judge Gregory L. Frost halted the execution scheduled for Feb. 22 of Michael Webb of Clermont County. Frost also allowed Webb to join other death-penalty defendants in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s lethal-injection protocol.

The Republican presidential candidates want you to look past the stiff suits and debate rhetoric and see that they’re good guys — husbands, fathers, Christians.

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted yesterday to allow a further increase in the federal debt limit, permitting President Barack Obama to borrow $1.2 trillion more to operate a government that spent 55 percent more than it collected in revenue last year.

CAIRO — A top U.S. official’s son who is working for a pro-democracy group in Egypt has been barred from leaving the country, along with at least five other Americans, escalating a crackdown on such groups by Egypt’s military government that has outraged the United States.

WASHINGTON — As traditional military operations are cut back, the Pentagon is moving to expand the worldwide reach of the U.S. Special Operations Command to strike back wherever threats arise.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon released a budget blueprint yesterday that cuts projected military spending by nearly half a trillion dollars, yet still calls for increasing the base defense budget in all but one of the next five years.

LAS VEGAS — Declaring the United States the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas,” President Barack Obama began pushing yesterday for greater use of the domestic resource as he pitched his economic plan on a tour of election battleground states.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer says she meant no disrespect when she pointed a finger at President Barack Obama during an intense discussion on an airport tarmac.

WASHINGTON — Companies bailed out during the financial crisis still owe U.S. taxpayers nearly $133 billion, and the Treasury’s plans to recoup that money have been slowed by the volatile stock market and weakness among smaller banks.

EAST HAVEN, Conn. — The office of East Haven’s mayor was blasted with prank phone calls and a delivery of hundreds of tacos yesterday after his now-famous quip that he would address accusations of anti-Latino bias by eating tacos, a remark that left emotions raw in the town’s large Hispanic community.

An error on the ballot has led a northeastern Ohio judge to throw out a tax increase voters approved to raise money for police.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Bev Perdue, a Democrat who barely won the governorship of North Carolina three years ago and never gained widespread popularity, said yesterday that she will not seek re-election this fall.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — An aggressive Mitt Romney repeatedly challenged Republican presidential rival Newt Gingrich in a fast-paced debate last night, ridiculing the former House speaker’s call to build costly projects in key primary states and to colonize the moon.

Somalia, which hasn’t had a national government in more than two decades, faces a host of complex problems including famine, religious extremism, piracy and a flood of refugees.

In Chillicothe, you can’t have a cow in the backyard, but you can keep a cougar.

Charter schools that serve dropouts and students at risk of quitting school can’t fairly be judged by the same standards as other schools, but they should be judged. Families in the unhappy position of needing that sort of help for their children deserve to know which ones are most effective.

Florida is the state that put the first man on the moon, NBC’s Brian Williams noted at the Republican presidential debate in Tampa. He asked the candidates, “At a time when you all want to shrink federal spending, should space exploration be a priority?”

The news media seem obsessed with the serial affairs of a younger Newt Gingrich back in the last century. The anger of his second of three wives mysteriously became national news on ABC’s Nightline on the eve of the South Carolina primary.

You know politicians are serious when they move from campaigning to governing. Something like that may be happening on the Republican campaign trail — but, unfortunately, not at the White House.

If history is a living thing, then for the second half of the 20th century, Columbus’ history made itself at home at the Clarmont steakhouse. It’s no exaggeration to say that 684 S. High St. was where Very Important Things were discussed, deals were made and lives were changed.